This news cuts deep and apparently will take a long time to heal.
It’s nice to look at how far we’ve come as a species with our smartphones, AI assistants, and light-up poop on a stick. However, we should also remember the things we lost along the way, like tails, the belief that diseases were caused by the moon’s effect on the four humors, and the ability to heal ourselves quickly.
Sure, you might think you can bounce back from a paper cut or halberd wound as well as the next person, but compared to our fellow primates, we’ve woefully fallen behind as a species. This was learned by Professor Akiko Matsumoto of Okinawa Prefecture’s The University of the Ryukyus in collaboration with Kyoto University, the University of Montpellier in France, and the Kenya Primate Research Institute.
Matsumoto’s area of expertise has been learning about human evolution by studying other primates. Over the course of her research in Kenya, she often witnessed wild baboons get injured, either by each other or their surroundings, and she too was not immune to the occasional scrape out in the field. However, she observed that the baboons tended to heal much faster than she did.
▼ Physically at least. Who knows how long it takes to heal a broken baboon heart?
This sparked a comparative study into the healing speed of humans and other primates. The research used 24 humans with ages ranging from their 20s to their 90s, six olive baboons, five Sykes’ monkeys, six vervet monkeys, and five chimpanzees. Of these subjects, the chimpanzees had injuries from fights observed while the others all had ethically administered incisions and their rate of all wounds’ disappearance was measured.
As a result, it was found that all of the animals had comparable recovery times, except for humans who were almost three times as slow to heal themselves. Humans were seen to heal at a rate of about 0.25 millimeters per day, whereas non-human primates clocked in at an impressive 0.6 millimeters per day.
▼ The y-axis measures the amount healed and the x-axis measures days. The purple line measures human test subjects, the green baboons, orange chimpanzees, yellow vervet monkeys, and blue Sykes’ monkeys.
If that weren’t bad enough, the human race could very well be an outlier among all living creatures. Matsumoto also performed the same tests on eight mice and four rats only to find that they had similar healing rates to the other non-human primates.
▼ Chart showing the evolutionary relationship between (from left to right) rats, mice, Sykes’ monkeys, olive baboons, vervet monkeys, chimpanzees, and humans in millions of years. Chimpanzees are one of the most closely related animals to humans but heal more like mice than us, so genetic similarity seemed to have little to do with it.
Although the reason for this isn’t known for certain, Matsumoto suspects it could be one of three possibilities or a combination of them. First, animals have more extensive areas of thick hair on their bodies than humans which can act as a protective barrier that supports the healing process. Secondly, at least humans can take solace in knowing we’re more thick-skinned than other animals, but unfortunately the thicker the skin, the longer it takes to heal completely.
Finally, our ability to recover from wounds may have been outpaced by other animals through evolution. Humans have learned to thrive by living in societies and taking care of each other with ever-improving medical technology. As a result, there wasn’t a need to heal ourselves quickly, but for animals in the wild, fast recovery has always been an essential part of survival of the fittest and natural selection.
That being said, our rapidly advancing medical technology may help us win this race in the end. Advancements in wound-repairing technology are getting surprisingly close to Star Trek levels of speed and effectiveness, and we may even be able to make fast-healing robots to boot. Maybe if those baboons stop acting so smug about their own fast healing we’ll let them use our toys too.
Source: The University of The Ryukyus, withnews
Featured image: Pakutaso
Insert images: Wikipedia/Gary M. Stolz, The University of The Ryukyus (1, 2)
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